It didn’t take long for the local branch of Gannett corporate to announce they’re selling off their local news offices after they closed down their printing operation for the Argus Leader in the state:
Following the closing of the printing facility earlier this month, the Argus Leader building in downtown Sioux Falls will be put up for sale on Monday.
and..
“The Argus Leader as an institution isn’t going anywhere.”
They aren’t going anywhere?
Well, a good chunk of the operation just moved to Iowa. Let’s see how long “not going anywhere” lasts.
It won’t be long until the Argus and all the news ‘papers’ are entirely virtual. All of their reporters will work from home and wherever the news is happening. Hard copies of the newspaper will cease to exist. They will be all online and maybe they should be. I am still a bit nostalgic for the newspapers I grew up with, but those days are gone.
The time is also coming where legals and public notices should have a website they can post to vs. the old newspaper model. The Argus has proved the point — very few people are reading the hard copies. So the question becomes — why should our government entities, along with other statutory notices, be required to use these newspapers? Someone should create public information site as an alternative.
I dropped my subscription
The Argus Leader is not going anywhere because it has already left. it is sad in a way, but also exciting as there will be new opportunities for news organizations to emerge. I keep hearing over 1/2 of the jobs twenty years from now have not been invented yet. I suspect part of that is the new jobs in the field of news. Things look different today compared with twenty years ago and they will look different in twenty years.
Might as well do away with the old town name newspapers and just do USA Today.